Latest news with #AI-powered
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Palantir Is Surging. The Stock Leads Nasdaq Gains So Far This Year as Federal Work Expands
Palantir shares climbed Friday amid optimism about the AI darling's expanding work for the U.S. government. Palantir's Foundry technology has been integrated with at least four government agencies, the The New York Times reported Friday. With Friday's gains, the stock has surged nearly 70% this year and leads Nasdaq 100 companies so far in (PLTR) shares climbed Friday amid optimism about the AI darling's expanding work for the U.S. government. The stock was up over 5% in recent trading, making it one of the day's best-performing stocks in the S&P 500. The stock has surged 70% this year, leading the Nasdaq 100's constituents so far in 2025. Palantir's gains have come as its work for the federal government has grown in recent months. The government has integrated a Palantir product called Foundry into at least four agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Health and Human Services Department, The New York Times reported Friday. Officials at the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service have also had discussions with Palantir about buying its technology, the report said. Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the SSA or IRS. Earlier this week, Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage backer, announced the launch of an AI-powered crime detection unit in partnership with Palantir. Fannie Mae claimed the unit would help prevent millions of dollars in fraud losses by helping detect fraud 'with speed and precision never before seen in the U.S. housing market.' Read the original article on Investopedia Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New York Post
12 hours ago
- Business
- New York Post
Judge in Google antitrust trial presses DOJ on AI's role in future competition
The judge overseeing the landmark antitrust case against Google pressed Justice Department lawyers on whether potential search engine rivals will have room to grow amid the rise of artificial intelligence – a critical question as he considers the government's push to break up its illegal monopoly. US District Judge Amit Mehta — who labeled Google a 'monopolist' in a separate trial that wrapped up last year — dug into the issue during closing arguments of the remedy phase in a Washington court on Friday. 'Do you think someone is going to come off the sidelines and build a new general search engine in light of what we are seeing?' Mehta asked, referring to the rise of AI-powered search tools offered by Google and others. US District Judge Amit Mehta questioned what role AI would play in search engine competition. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist described so-called generative AI as the 'gateway to search,' while hammering home the agency's argument that any court-ordered remedies must address new and future technology, not just Google's past indiscretions. 'The reason we are so focused on Gen AI is because that is the new search access point,' Dahlquist said. The DOJ has asked Mehta to force Google to sell off its Chrome web browser and ensure it cannot use its AI tools to further entrench its illegal monopoly over the industry – among other proposed fixes. Mehta has said he will make a final decision by August. Aside from a divestment of Chrome and AI-focused remedies, the DOJ has argued that Google should no longer be allowed to pay companies like Apple to ensure its search engine is set as the default option on most smartphones. The feds also want to force Google to share search data with rivals. Their proposal also suggests requiring Google to sell off its Android operating system if initial remedies prove ineffective. Google has pushed back, arguing the DOJ's proposals go far beyond the judge's initial ruling and would 'break these platforms.' The company has gone as far as to suggest that a forced breakup would jeopardize US national security and allow China to beat the US in the race to build advanced AI. Google faces a historic breakup of its search empire. Thaspol – Google also argued that it faces fierce competition from other AI-powered platforms, such as those offered by Sam Altman's OpenAI. 'DOJ's case ignores how intense competition has transformed the industry. Well-funded services like ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity and MetaAI are rapidly gaining users and distribution, and adding innovations at a breakneck pace,' Google vice president of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post. During closing arguments, Google attorney John Schmidtlein said the company has already addressed AI-related search concerns by no longer pursuing exclusivity deals with wireless carriers and smartphone makers, including Samsung. Earlier in the remedy trial, an OpenAI executive said that the company would be interested in acquiring Chrome if it were up for sale. The executive also acknowledged that OpenAI would benefit if it had access to Google search data.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Thoma Bravo considers sale of Apryse for more than $3bn
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is considering sale of Apryse, a document processing software provider, potentially valuing it at more than $3bn, reported Reuters citing people familiar with the matter. The company has garnered interest from various buyers, particularly other private equity firms. Apryse sale process is being facilitated by investment bankers from Lazard, sources told the news agency. Thoma Bravo may opt to keep a minority stake in the company post-sale, but sources have indicated that a final sale is not certain and have requested anonymity due to the private nature of the discussions. Requests for comments from Thoma Bravo were declined, and there were no responses from Apryse or Lazard. Based in Denver, Colorado, Apryse specialises in document processing technology for mobile and computer applications, enabling developers to create, edit, convert digital documents, and integrate these functions into their own software. The firm boasts notable clients such as Novartis, Wells Fargo, and DocuSign. The company was previously known as PDFTron before being rebranded to Apryse two years after its acquisition by Thoma Bravo in 2021. Since the acquisition by Thoma Bravo, Apryse has made nine add-on acquisitions to broaden its functionality and global presence. These acquisitions include the recently announced TallComponents, a digital document processor based in the Netherlands, and last year's purchase of AI-powered software company Lead Technologies. Apryse generates more than $100m in EBITDA and has been growing at a rate of more than 20% annually. Sources suggest that Apryse could be valued at a multiple of 30 times its EBITDA or more in any forthcoming transaction. In 2024, Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire UK cybersecurity company Darktrace for $5bn (£3.99bn). "Thoma Bravo considers sale of Apryse for more than $3bn" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It's the End of the World (And It's Their Fault)
It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. 'I take it you've seen the news,' he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Of course I had. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. 'Incredibly fucking depressing,' Armstrong said. 'No notes.' The moment felt a little bit like a glitch in the simulation, though it also pinpointed exactly the kind of challenge facing Armstrong. I had traveled to Park City to meet him on the set of Mountainhead, a film he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an ambitious, extremely timely project about a group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend just as one of them releases AI-powered tools that cause a global crisis. Signalgate was the latest, most outrageous bit of news from the Trump administration that seemed to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong possibly satirize an era where reality feels like it's already cribbing from his scripts? The film was billed to me as an attempt to capture the real power and bumbling hubris of a bunch of arrogant and wealthy men (played by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who try to rewire the world and find themselves in way over their heads. This was an easy premise for me to buy into, not just because of Signalgate, but also because I'd spent the better part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, during which time DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old computer programmer who goes by the online nickname 'Big Balls' a senior adviser to the State Department. In order to keep the film feeling fresh in this breakneck news cycle, Armstrong pushed to complete the project on an extraordinarily short timeline: He pitched the film in December and wrote parts of the script in the back of a car while driving around with location scouts. When we met, Youssef told me that the 'way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall.' [Read: The 400-year-old tragedy that captures our chaos] By the time I met Armstrong—affable and easygoing both on and off set—he was unfazed by fact seeming stranger than his fiction. 'There's almost something reassuring about it,' he said. 'It's all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I'm not too worried about the news beating me to the punch.' Lots of his work, including Succession and some writing on political satires, such as Veep and The Thick of It, draw loose and sometimes close inspiration from current events. The trick, Armstrong told me, is finding a 'comfortable distance' from what's happening in reality. The goal is to let audiences bring their context to his art but still have a good time and not feel as if they're doomscrolling. For instance, one of the main characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (played by Smith), who's also the richest man in the world. But the comparisons to our real tech moguls aren't one-to-one. 'I don't think you'd think he's a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried,' Armstrong said. Mountainhead is Armstrong's first project since Succession. That show's acclaim—19 Emmy and nine Golden Globe wins—cemented Armstrong and his team of writers as the preeminent satirists of contemporary power and wealth. His decision to focus on the tech world can feel like a cultural statement of its own. Succession managed to capture the depravity, hilarity, and emptiness of modern politics, media, and moguldom existing parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. But while Mountainhead has plenty of Succession's DNA—sharing many of the same producers and writers, and some of the crew—it's much more of a targeted strike than the 39-episode HBO show. Rather than a narrative epic of unserious failsons, the film offers a relatively straightforward portrait of buffoonish elites who believe that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ'd masses. In some ways, Mountainhead picks up where a different HBO series, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the limits of and poking fun at the myth of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor. The tech guys weren't supposed to be the next group up in the blender, Armstrong told me. He was trying to work on a different project when he became interested in the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and something of a media nerd—on set, he joked that he's probably accidentally paying for dozens of niche Substacks—and quickly went down the tech rabbit hole. Reading news articles turned into skimming through biographies. Eventually, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab sessions on the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. 'In the end, I just couldn't stop thinking about these people,' he told me. 'I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance.' As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are crucial to Mountainhead's pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as 'podcast earworms.' At one point, Carell's character, Randall, the elder-statesman venture capitalist, describes Youssef's character as a 'decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance.' (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the probability of an AI apocalypse.) 'There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us—taking notes and watching podcasts,' Carell told me about his rapid preparation process. When we spoke, all of the actors stressed that they didn't model their characters off individual people. But some of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef's character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has built a powerful AI tool capable of stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis's social network. He has misgivings about the fallout from his friend's platform, but also sees his company's stock rising because of the chaos. [From the April 2025 issue: Growing up Murdoch] 'One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness—mixed with a soft emotional instability—in Jeff,' Youssef told me. 'He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it's probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition.' This halted adolescence was a running theme. On a Tuesday evening around 9 p.m., I stood on set watching five consecutive takes of a scene (that was later cut from the film) where Youssef jumps onto a chair while calling a honcho at the IMF, and starts vigorously humping Schwartzman's head. The mansion itself is like a character in the film. The production designer Stephen Carter told me it was chosen in part because 'it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends'—an ostentatious glass-and-metal structure with a private ski lift, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball court. Carter, who also did production design on Succession, said that it's important to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that accurately capture and mimic the scale of wealth and power of its characters. 'Taste is fungible,' Carter told me, 'but the amount of square footage is not.' They knew they'd settled on the right property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of photography, visited. 'He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house,' Carter said. 'Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something.' The costuming choices reflected the banality of the tech elites, with a few flourishes, like the bright Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and long underwear worn in one early scene. 'Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns,' the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted. True sickos like myself, who've followed the source material and news reports closely, can play the parlor game of trying to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell's character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but also utters pseudophilosophic phrases like 'in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity' that read like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of old. Schwartzman's character, Souper—the poorest of the group, whose nickname is short for soup kitchen—gives off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that reminds me of an acolyte from Musk's text messages. [Read: Elon Musk's texts shatter the myth of the tech genius] But Armstrong insists he's after something more than a roast. What made tech billionaires so appealing to him as a subject matter is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the speed with which they move through the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, while eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis seems unable to connect with his son; Jeff is wracked with a guilty conscience; Randall is terrified of his looming mortality; and Souper just wants to be loved. 'I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy,' Armstrong told me when I asked him about capturing the tone of the tech world. 'And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they're so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?' By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he's satirizing. Perhaps because he's written from their perspective, he's empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. 'It's like how the politician always thinks they've got the answer,' he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley's scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington's sclerotic politicians. There's less oversight too. The innovators don't ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. 'In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,' he said. 'You'd need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don't think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.' For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of these men paints a more unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling might. For example, these men feel superhuman, but are also struggling with their own mortality and trying to build technologies that will let them live forever in the cloud. They are hyperconfident and also deeply insecure about their precise spots on the Forbes list. They spout pop philosophy but are selling nihilism. 'We're gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious,' Venis says at one point in the film. 'Nothing means anything. And everything's funny and cool.' In Mountainhead, as the global, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an 'intellectual salon' where the group imagine the ways they could rescue the world from the disaster they helped cause. They bandy about ideas about 'couping out' the United States or trying to go 'post-human' by ushering in artificial general intelligence. At one point, not long after standing over a literal map of the world from the board game Risk, one billionaire asks, 'Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' Another quips: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.' The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong's tech bros delivers the bulk of both the dark humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn't hold the viewers' hand, but asks them to lean into the performance. If they do, they'll see a portrayal that might very well give necessary context to the current moment: a group of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The problem is that the rest of us are the pawns. 'The scary thing is that usually—normally—democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power,' Armstrong said near the end of our conversation. 'But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?' Mountainhead will certainly scratch the itch for Succession fans. But unlike his last hit, which revolved around blundering siblings who are desperate to acquire the power that their father wields, Armstrong's latest is about people who already have power and feel ordained to wield it. It's a dark, at times absurdist, comedy—but with the context of our reality, it sometimes feels closer to documentary horror. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Cision Canada
16 hours ago
- Business
- Cision Canada
Dynatrace Names DXC Global Partner of the Year
ASHBURN, Va., May 30, 2025 /CNW/ - DXC Technology, a leading Fortune 500 global technology services provider, today announced it has been named Global Partner of the Year at the Dynatrace Amplify Partner Sales Kickoff. The award recognizes DXC's 15-year strategic collaboration with Dynatrace—marked by deep technical expertise, strategic investment, and transformative results for enterprise customers worldwide. The Global Partner of the Year Award honors organizations that demonstrate exceptional innovation and drive market adoption for Dynatrace solutions. DXC earned this distinction for its ability to leverage innovative solutions from Dynatrace to foster growth and success, consistently exceeding expectations and addressing the evolving needs of enterprises. DXC was also recognized for spearheading the establishment of a Dynatrace strategic business unit, with more than 280 certified engineers and over 1,500 trained professionals worldwide. "This recognition underscores the power of our partnership and the trust our customers place in our joint solutions," said Howard Boville, President, DXC Consulting & Engineering Services Powered by AI. "In just the past 15 months, we've helped more than 200 organizations, including some of the most complex enterprises in the world—adopt Dynatrace. With the industry's largest team of Dynatrace-certified engineers, a dedicated business unit, and automation that facilitates onboarding in minutes, we're enabling clients to accelerate transformation, resolve issues faster, and realize the full value of AI-powered observability." " It's my honor to congratulate DXC Technology on being named our 2025 Global Partner of the Year. This well-deserved award reflects DXC's remarkable commitment to innovating and driving market growth, and we couldn't be prouder to recognize their achievements. Our combined potential to deliver true business outcomes is only increasing, and we look forward to building on this success and delivering even greater impact in the year to come," said Jay Snyder, SVP, Global Partners and Alliances, Dynatrace. DXC brings unparalleled scale and expertise to the Dynatrace ecosystem, with one of the largest investments in Dynatrace talent across the IT industry. DXC's dedicated Global Dynatrace Strategic Business Group reflects its commitment to delivering next-generation observability solutions for our customers. DXC is also the only IT services provider with a Center of Excellence focused on Logs Management on Grail, which highlights our leadership in applying AI to enterprise-scale applications. To learn more about how DXC is partnering with Dynatrace to drive innovation and deliver powerful outcomes on a global scale, visit here. About DXC Technology DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run their mission-critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private and hybrid clouds. The world's largest companies and public sector organizations trust DXC to deploy services to drive new levels of performance, competitiveness, and customer experience across their IT estates. Learn more about how we deliver excellence for our customers and colleagues at SOURCE DXC Technology Company
